It seems that the massed forces of the American right will not, repeat not, be picketing Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, mainly since they don't want to give it any more publicity than it's getting. This is surprising, since the movie - featuring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as cowboys who while away one lonely summer by falling in love and indulging in an awful lot of grunty, spit-lubed gay sex - seems, on paper at least, calculated to cause maximum offence against America's most cherished myths and favourite movie genre. Well, they may not be boycotting it, but the fundies are plenty ready to tell us what they hate about the movie. Up in Caspar, Wyoming, home to one Richard Bruce Cheney and not far from the home of Annie Proulx, who wrote the short story the movie's based on, the local paper recently quoted local playwright Sandy Dixon (a woman) as saying, "There's nothing better than plain old cowboys and the plain old history without embellishing it to suit everybody."

And Robert Knight (manly name or what?), director of the Culture and Family Institute of Concerned Women of America (a not so manly-sounding workplace, no?), is really steamed up. "I think this shows that Hollywood can pervert anything," he told Salon.com. "Part of the enduring appeal of westerns is the display of brotherhood, unhindered by sexualisation. You often hear the phrase 'to be a straight-shooter'. That means to speak plain truths and walk easily amid the natural bonds of affection, without the distraction of misplaced sexual urges. In other words, the audience can relax. Their hero is not going to get weird on them. The western was a morality tale, so to make immorality the heart of this western is to violate the code of westerns. That's why it's not going to work. I think Ang Lee is off his rocker if he thinks he can have the same commercial success with two cowboys instead of a cowboy and a cowgirl, as other movies do."

The first thought that springs to mind on hearing this drivel - after the phrase "you boring, bigoted asshole" - is who is this guy kidding? First, we might challenge him to name the last heterosexual western that topped the box office. Yup, pardner, it's been a while. Second, the western as a morality tale? Perhaps, if robbing stages, trains and banks, or gunning men down in cold blood, or massacring Indians by the tribeful can be counted as moral, or if murderous, rapacious land, railroad or cattle barons are moral figures, or if a mythic universe that characterises women as virgins (schoolmarms) or prostitutes ("showgirls") is moral, to say nothing of a genre in which male brotherhood under a capacious sky is the very highest state a man can hunger after.

What would Knight say of Stagecoach, in which wanted criminal John Wayne falls for outcast whore Claire Trevor, a union openly idealised by the film? I guess that's OK: bandit, yes; assbandit, nooooooo! What has he to say of the myriad male couples in westerns of the unselfconscious, pre-1960 era, such as James Stewart and Walter Brennan in The Far Country, constantly bickering like an old married couple, yet totally loyal and devoted to one another? And what about all those singin' cowboys, with their fancy-ass boots, rhinestone-encrusted western shirts and outrageous Nudie Cohen suits? Does he detect no shadow of "misplaced sexual urges" inherent in any of these scenarios?

Let's get real, folks. The western, America's trove of foundation myths and "morality" tales, literally throbs with latent homoeroticism. Examine the following list of cowboy-movie titles and tell me which one isn't a gay porno movie: Man Hunt, Rawhide, Little Big Man, Two Rode Together, Seven Men From Now, Heller In Pink Tights, The Lusty Men, All The Pretty Horses, The Naked Spur, Dirty Harry, Rancho Notorious, Heaven's Gate, Saddle Tramps, A Fistful Of Dynamite or Bareback Mounting. OK, the last one isn't a gay porno movie yet, but give 'em a couple of weeks. Why, even supermasculine John Wayne's back catalogue suggests the western is a tad light in the stirrups: Men Without Women, Rough Romance, Two-Fisted Law, Pals Of The Saddle, Blue Steel and, best of all, Ride Him, Cowboy! That closet door is fairly straining to open. Poor ol' Duke, don't fence him in!

Is there any wonder, given all this, that the cowboy and the Indian were two of your more prominent Village People? Despite our more despicable homophobic stereotypes, many, if not most, gay men aren't interested in girly-boys - they want manly men, hence the prominence of gay-fantasy figures such as cops, lumberjacks, drill sergeants and - giddy up, fellas - the wild cowboys of the wide open range, even if they are clad in leather chaps, 10-gallon hats and one-gallon condoms. Neither should one doubt the popularity of phenomena like gay rodeos and western-themed gay bars, even as they exist side-by-side with horrible homophobic atrocities like the brutal murder of gay student Matthew Shepard by two rednecks in, yup, Wyoming in 1998.

It's not like this should surprise us. Ever since literary critic Leslie Fiedler wrote his famous 1948 essay "Git Back in the Raft, Huck Honey", about the loud hum of homoeroticism in manly 19thcentury American literature, the eagle-eyed cultural critic has had no problem identifying subversive currents of sexual dissidence in America's most conservative and masculine genres. In (lesbian) novelist Willa Cather's stories of the Nebraska prairie in the late 19th century, you'll always come across a pair of old cowboys living and managing a farm together, something Cather calls "batching", presumably deriving from "bachelordom" and highly suggestive of naughtiness come the bunk-down hour. The prairie and the wild west were often lonely, womanless places and whether they are in jail, the navy or the armies of ancient Sparta, men without women will surely turn to one another for comfort, and never say a word about it thereafter. "I ain't no queer," says Ledger's character in Brokeback Mountain, after a full summer of happy homoerotic humping. "Me neither," replies Gyllenhaal. OK boys, glad we got that straightened out.

Until censorship began to ebb in the 1960s, however, most of this remained subterranean, unarticulated - dare we say, closeted? There were no gays in westerns because women were there to embody all the things that real cowboys thought were plain, well, faggy: domesticity, gentility, education, hearth and home, wallpaper, bathtubs, haircuts, all that gay stuff. Only occasionally was there a knowing leer in the general direction of homosexuality, such as Howard Hawks' Red River, with that wonderful scene in which gunfighters Monty Clift (in real life a closeted gay man) and John Ireland check out each other's pistol - "My, that's a nice one ..." - in the most lascivious, eye-rolling manner imaginable: you can almost picture them clutching each other's crotches somewhere below the bottom of the frame. Self-consciousness and gathering minority-awareness - along with Andy Warhol's explicitly gay Lonesome Cowboys in 1968 - changed things in the early 1970s, giving us the well-adjusted gay Indian in Little Big Man. Or Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, two bickering, totally loyal, inarguably beautiful men who toted Katherine Ross around with them almost as a sexual alibi. It's as if they're saying: "See this cutie? Don't she prove we ain't doin' each other?" Well, perhaps, fellas.

These days sexual dissidence is part of the great parade of life out west, much of whose iconography was updated and drawn closer to reality by the novels of Brokeback adapter Larry McMurtry and the movies made from them. Paul Newman's Hud, from McMurtry's Horseman, Ride By, is a nearrapist, and the most memorable line from his The Last Picture Show is surely "Liss all git us a heifer to fuck!" There's Iggy Pop's crossdressing prospector in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, the woman-as-man western The Ballad Of Little Jo, and Gus Van Sant's gender-bending Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. Brokeback Mountain is merely the first mainstream movie to centre on homosexuality on the open range, and it wouldn't be in the least controversial - it's about the self-defeating nature of love, after all, not sexuality - were America not unimaginably neurotic and puritanical about sex, straight or gay, in the first place.